Like so many of your readers, I say many many thanks for this initiative. You certainly nailed me with this posting! I hope we all don’t wear you out with our tortured inquiries.

I’m a computer scientist, and look at “processes” from the point of view of an operating system: it does not, it *cannot*, matter what the various processes are doing – that’s their business. From the os point of view they all look the same. Just anonymous abstract discrete processes, doing what processes do: Wait and Signal to the outside, maintain stable (often concurrent) state inside.

These being *discrete* processes, one can imagine doing some combinatorics both along and across various event sequences, and hopefully find some structure. And that’s what we did, starting with processes with one bit of state, and building up from there. We report the results at TauQuernions.org.

This is where your post about the Higgs and gravity comes in. One would expect that a purely combinatorial approach like ours would produce results unbiased by any other criteria – prior knowledge, theoretical constructions, biases, what-have-you. One pattern that pops out is

H = (ab-cd) + (ac+bd) + (ad-bc) = Tx + Ty + Tz

which is nilpotent. In fact, the three pairs are isomorphic to the quaternions except that they are irreversible, and as well, each is an entanglement operator. Quaternions being the very definition of 3d space, we MAYBE made the mistake you describe, of confounding the Higgs, mass creation, and gravity.

But I don’t *think* so, because we stop at the point where we dot Tx+Ty+Tz with whatever X is to manifest in 3+1d tauquernion space. Ie. we simply punt, not knowing the necessary physics to take it any further. I agree that if this projection disagrees with well-established theory, then we’ve likely figured wrong. But it’s not obvious to me this will be so. Eg. our measure of heft is bits, which translate to energy, not to mass.

In addition, we found a number of patterns that I don’t really find echoed in the expert discussions. One wonders. Finally, we suggest that it follows that the mechanism underlying gravity is entanglement, and this seems to collide with your argument. Yet our approach, being purely combinatorial, is supposedly theory-neutral.

So, if our approach *is* truly flawed, I’d sure like to know just where it goes off the rails.